The Twins Stories: Participant Coding in Yagua Narrative (UC Publications in Linguistics)

This work is a quantitative discourse study of referential devices in Yagua, a relatively unstudied language of the Amazon basin. Of particular interest are folktales in which the major participants are matched pairs, and which involve extensive use of direct speech. A major finding is that the indices of "Referential Distance" and "Persistence" quantify distinct functional domains.